Pagefile on D: partition being deleted after reboot

ksio89 · 08 Jun 2023

There's not much free space on system (C:) partition in my laptop NVMe SSD, thus I set pagefile to only 1GB so Windows can still generate crash dumps, and 3GB on another partition (D:) in the same drive. However, the pagefile on this partition keeps being deleted after a reboot, no matter whether it's set to system managed or custom size.

Pagefile.sys is created at D: after setting up virtual memory, however it's gone after a reboot. I check Registry and the correspondent key is modified after setting and is not deleted after reboot, as expected, but I don't understand why Windows is still nuking the pagefile on this separate partition after a reboot.

I'm not much worried about performance because pagefile is essentially only accessed when using a hypervisor to run VMs along with a few browser tabs, I just want to prevent applications from crashing due to lack of memory. E: partition is an HDD, so it's not the ideal place to host a pagefile.

Here's relevant info:

OS: Windows 10 Home Single Language version 22H2 build 19045.3031

RAM: 16GB DDR4-3200

cereberus · 08 Jun 2023

There's not much point in having two pagefiles on different partitions on same drive.

I would decrease D drive size by 3GB and allocate the space to the C drive and let Windows manage size preferably. Alternatively only have one on D drive.

ksio89 · 08 Jun 2023

cereberus said:

There's not much point in having two pagefiles on different partitions on same drive.

I would decrease D drive size by 3GB and allocate the space to the C drive and let Windows manage size preferably. Alternatively only have one on D drive.

I can't have a single pagefile on D:, as after every logon I get this message:

It was discussed on Superuser forums, Windows pretty much requires a pagefile on system partition:

pagefile - "Windows created a temporary paging file" message after every startup - Super User

Guess I have no alternative than to shrink D: partition and then extend C:.

zebal · 08 Jun 2023

@ksio89
You said to be creating a 3GB page file on another drive, however the message seems self-explanatory that this is too low.

System-managed page files automatically grow up to three times the physical memory or 4 GB (whichever is larger, but no more than one-eighth of the volume size) when the system commit charge reaches 90 percent of the system commit limit. This assumes that enough free disk space is available to accommodate the growth.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/tr...-the-page-file

So you can test it with a minimum of 4GB on D partition and no page file on C partition.

cereberus · 09 Jun 2023

Well, it works fine for me.

I have crosschecked my registry office settings.

There are some keys I do not have.

I suspect it is the pagefileonosvolume key set to 1 that is causing your issue.
Try setting it to zero or deleting key.

Also a couple of other differences

Pagefile on D: partition being deleted after reboot-s2.png

ksio89 · 09 Jun 2023

cereberus said:

Well, it works fine for me.

I have crosschecked my registry office settings.

There are some keys I do not have.

I suspect it is the pagefileonosvolume key set to 1 that is causing your issue.
Try setting it to zero or deleting key.

Also a couple of other differences

You were absolutely right, setting that key to 0 fixed the issue, thank you very much! That was actually suggested on the Superuser post I linked, but I hadn't noticed it until you commented on that. I set fixed pagefiles of 1GB on C: and 4GB on D:, which is more than enough to run a browser, VMWare Workstation and a few applications without running out of memory.